It is now day four of my polyphasic sleep case study and I have never seen our kitchen so clean. This is the second morning in a row that, looking for something to do with all this extra time, I cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom. The pros of polyphasic sleep it would appear at present moment, all seem to be felt by my girlfriend who has slept better now that she only has to deal with my tossing and snoring for a couple hours a night and who wakes up each day to a clean kitchen and (2 out of 3 mornings) breakfast. I am unfortunately still waiting for the full benefits of my new sleep cycle.

The worst part of the day by far is my first nap. In ten or fifteen minutes here (5:00am) I will be laying down to take the first of my 3 naps for the day. It has been very difficult for me to get up from this nap the past two days. I wake up feeling unrested and extremely groggy. Two days ago, I slept through my nap alarm and woke up at 9:30.

What I think I have to remind myself of is this: I am still in the adjustment period and it will take at least five more days to be in the swing of things. For now, I have to deal with only some of my naps yielding a deep, REM sleep and my head being a little cloudy (or a lot cloudy). Also important is having a plan for what I’m going to do after waking up from my nap. This morning, I will be organizing my desk and office space until about 6:45 and then I’m riding my bike to the Clintonville Community Market.

Wow, that first post was more cracked out than I ever imagined it would be. Hilarious. I literally rolled out of bed and sat in front of the computer to write that whiney installment. My goal was: write blog post, get in bed, forget I ever heard of polyphasic sleep. But I was able to shake off the 3am patina of delerious thinking, eye crusties and incoherence. Lucky for me and my case study, I am a 3 hour core-sleep and one 30 minute nap into my polyphasic experiment. I even had a dream during my nap, which would suggest that I entered REM.

From 3-5 I made homemade ravioli and cleaned the kitchen (it needed it). I ditched the acorn squash idea and just made the filling from goat cheese and ricotta. Acorn squash was just too much work after my first night of truncated sleep.

I feel pretty good right now. I’m anticipating a crash here in a bit, which, if Murphy’s Law holds up, will likely hit me just as the lunch rush comes through the door. As long as I don’t pass out on the press grill, I’ll consider today a success.

Yea. And though I do feel pretty awful (and a little bit like I have to go to the airport) the worst part is getting out of bed as Julie is getting into bed. Almost didn’t get up at all. If this experiment is abruptly ended, it’s because I can’t justify a schedule that threatens the time we spend together.

My goal for the next two hours is to make homemade acron squash and goat cheese ravioli, eat breakfast and take my first nap of the day.

In 30 days of night, Sheriff of Barrow, Alaska, Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnet) leads a party of survivors into the attic of an old house. Outside, the awful sounds of opportunistic vampires set loose on Barrow’s prolonged darkness have the survivors resigned to their fate. “We’ll sleep in shifts,” Oleson says, “We’ll ration our food, and then we’ll figure out the next step.”

It’s such a cliche in survival fiction–we’ll sleep in shifts. In quotes, “we’ll sleep in shifts” yields 32,400 google results. “Don’t you die on me!” only yields 14,000!!

In 1990, the fifteenth episode of Married with Children’s fourth season (A Taxing Problem) aired on Fox. Al was facing an IRS audit and wanted to sell Peggy’s hair for $5,000. Afraid that her husband will cut her hair while she’s sleeping, Peggy enlists the girls to form a perimeter, “sleeping in shifts” to protect those red locks.

And it shows up it popular media and, uh, well, unpopular alike. In apckrfan’s Firefly fanfiction episode entitled, “Positive Affirmation,” and sandwiched between such literary gems as “Her body was still virginal. Contrary to her mind, it was untainted. The one thing she thought they’d been unable to take from her. A lone tear fell, cascading a path over her cheek, down her face, and dropping to the examining table she sat on. They’d even taken that from her it seemed.” and “His lips quivered into the hint of a smile like they so often did.” is a suggestion by the team’s leader to “sleep in shifts” so that the pregnant woman can have the bed for a couple hours. A considerate bunch.

But I digress. I’ve decided to pick up where the clicheists and sleep scientists left off. Starting in three hours and forty-five minutes, I’ll be experimenting with polyphasic sleep. If you don’t know what polyphasic sleep is, check out Dustin Curtis’s blog. Dustin’s blog is glossy (if electrons can be glossy) and professionally packaged. And his article on sleep is very interesting. He explores various strategies for sleeping from Monophasic (what most of us do anyway) to the Uberman sleep cycle, which, if you ever followed Seinfeld, is the DaVinci sleep that Kramer became infatuated with in episode 128, The Friar’s Club.

I won’t be experimenting with the Uberman. Like most people, I do not have a schedule that would permit me six naps every day (though 22 hours of waking time sounds pretty good). I will be following the “Everyman” sleep cycle: 3 hours of core sleep each night and three 20 minute naps throughout the day. And my goal is that this space be a place to catch my random thoughts and musings both about polyphasic sleep and not (did you see that the Democrats just got 60 members in the caucus? They’d better not blow it).

Can I succeed? Will 4 hours of sleep a day be adequate? Well, unfortunately for Sherrif Oleson, Peggy Bundy and Cosmo Kramer, one of them was forced to inject himself with vamp-blood only to die a horrible cinder-faced death once the sun finally came up, another ended up thrown into a river by mobsters and, well, Peggy just fell asleep–and Al couldn’t bring himself to cut her hair. What a sweetie.

Lo ho ho, but there is still hope for me. Because in apckrfan’s fanfiction I’m pretty sure the sleeping in shifts thing worked. I didn’t read it.

With a mountain of scientific and anectodal evidence suggesting that polyphasic sleeping is a panacea (or may kill you) I now march forward. There is baseball on TV, the Daily Show awaits and I have to get my homemade pasta making tools out so I have something to do at three in the morning when I so desperately want to go back to sleep. Until then, good luck to me and I’ll see you in a few hours.

Many things. Mostly, my new roommates have been good and I have been watching french tv and passing the Edith Piaf statue, rugged and un paris-like, that sits in the modest square in my house in the 20th, a more working-class neighborhood that noone seems to like except for me. She holds her hands up to the sky, and every few days or so, some parisian puts something in them: a bouquet of old flowers, a parking metal sign, a child’s glove. I truly, truly love it, and when I walk home I imagine her holding me up to the grey and raining sky, and I feel as though this lack-of-livelihood malaise will pass.

My mother recently sent me this article. This is true, I think. I will add some of my own trickery/being-tricked-by after the passage:“You’ve got to go there with the intention of learning life lessons. If you go there with your dukes up hoping to win the argument, all you’ll gain is their scorn, and you’ll return to the states uninspired and unchanged. Do not imagine that you know more than Paris. Paris has been put on this earth to teach us all a little humility. You bow to it; you don’t even presume to salute it. Who are you to speak as an equal to Paris? Paris is the beginning and the end, the first and the last, the yesterday and tomorrow of beauty and refinement. In Paris you learn to toss your salad seventeen times, and to peel an orange with a knife in a curvy column of rind that’s several feet long if you take the time and care. A French mother doesn’t watch her daughter grow up wishing for her to be the captain of the girls’ soccer team. A French mother schools her daughter in the delicacies of boy-girl/man-woman politics. Above all, grace. Above all, elegance. Above all, knowledge. A French mother teaches her daughter how to be her own person within a relationship (how to hold her own), how to expect and how to cause beauty.” –from “It’s Worth the Trouble” by Barbara WaterstonWow, that article pointed to some really true things. I have been doing what she says, I have been humbled again and again in Paris like it is a difficult country line dance, but you have already found yourself out on the dance floor and you have to at least try. Most recently, Chris and I went out to a café for him to read his theorists and for me to work on my translation, on a laptop computer. I plugged in my computer and after 20 minutes the owner came over and gave me a talking to about using their outlet for electricity. She was steaming and sassy. I knew just what to do. Instead of shrink inside and feel humiliated, I pouted my lips, raised my eyebrows, shrugged and said, “I’ll unplug it then,” in the same way that you would say, “You go make the sandwich.” No skin off of my back. I left with my computer out of battery but my pride intact. I too can play their little game.